I remember a brand like it was yesterday…

What does our brain do while we’re asleep? It sorts out all of the information it gathered during the previous day, analysing them, filtering and storing them into long term memory. But not all of them…

According to a study by a scientist from the University of Columbia, the brain prioritises positive, “high rewarding information”, discards neutral and irrelevant information focusing only on the ones it finds important for future decisions.*

This information is extremely important if you’re in marketing. Your commercial or ad should be conceived in a way that the brain of your potential buyer can recognize it as “high-rewarding” information and store it for future decisions.

This means that the next time the person has an encounter with your product, the subconscious sends a signal that the previous encounters with your product were good, which increases the chance that a shopper chooses your product.

YOU REMEMBER THE COMMERCIAL, BUT DO YOU REMEMBER THE PRODUCT?

One of the best traits of neuromarketing testing is the opportunity to measure the emotional response of an audience to the creative content created by your team or agency. A good strategy of a high quality commercial is to include your brand in the frame at the moments that represent an emotional peak (which can be measured).

Do you remember the Evian commercial “Rolling babies”? It was once inducted into the Guiness book of records as the most viral commercial and in 2009, the year of its release, it received over 50 million views. However, Evian’s sales that yearwent down 25% and the brand lost its market share.

I personally conducted an analysis of viral commercials using only the analysis of emotions through facial expression and Evian’s babies were among the commercials with the highest percentage of engagement and positive emotion.

If you watch that commercial, and especially its sequel, you’ll notice that there is only a handful of moments in it which include the Evian brand, and those moments are not the commercial’s emotional peaks, which means there is a high chance that the brain did not “store” the brand in the subconscious, only the positive association of babies pulling stunts.

WHAT DOES A GOOD COMMERCIAL LOOK LIKE?

Unfortunately, I can’t show you what brand is concerned, but the screenshot below demonstrates a positive reaction measured by EEG.

The blue line shows motivation, values above zero demonstrate the appeal of the commercial and as you can see, the values are positive for almost the entirety of the commercial’s length.

In the majority of the moments you see as emotional peaks, the brand logo is featured in the frame.

Also, the green line that represents attention is continually positive. Most importantly, look at the end of the commercial – cognitive overload falls to a minimum, whereas attention and motivation rise which shows that the creative team created a memorable closure. This piece of information is very important because of the so called “Peak-end” rule which says that we rate an overall experience by its peak and towards the end.

How can you be sure that your commercial or ad activates a positive reaction in the right moment? Currently, only neuromarketing can answer that question…

Behavioral marketing specialist, Google Growth Engine Ambassador (Adriatics) and founder of Promosapiens. Dalibor is a regular speaker at the international conferences: Shopper Brain (Netherlands), Dubai Lynx (UAE), Euroshop (Germany), Family Thinking Marketing Forum (Poland), Branding Conference (BiH), MEKST (Serbia), HOW Festival (Croatia), just to name a few… His lectures with the practical examples of behavioral marketing are regularly the highest rated among the audience.